We are driving 220 miles to see the UK’s only short-beaked echidna, an egg-laying mammal native to Australia and New Guinea and now resident in Devon’s Paignton Zoo. I learnt about this extraordinary creature only a few months ago from my eldest son Theo, now nine, who has declared the echidna his favourite-ever animal (a position formerly held by the very unhalachic pig). It feels like a pilgrimage, somehow, all five of us in search of this rare monotreme whose back is covered in protective spines, and who, by the way, is called Bruce and is 49 years old.
When it comes to all things animal-related, we listen to Theo. Because when our middle child was just six years old and madly into farms and all their creatures – he couldn’t care less about a tractor – he looked up at me with adorably wide blue eyes and announced: “Mummy, I love animals so I don’t want to eat them anymore.” And that was the end of that.
On talking to others, I learnt that I had friends who had wanted to be vegetarian as children back in the Eighties and Nineties – when gentle parenting was not even a futuristic dream – and their parents had shut down the idea. But how could I turn down such ethical and well-considered wishes from my son?
Secretly I felt guilty that we should all be a bit more Theo. I did make some conditions at the start: he would absolutely need to consume beans and vegetables, and he should consider fish every now and then. He agreed, and has never looked back.
Theo had enjoyed his school’s kosher meat meals, and even preferred them to the vegetarian option. But he has been committed to his pescatarian cause ever since – to the point of checking that sweets and vitamins are vegan.
It was not the beginning of vegetarianism for the whole Bray-Pearce family – our then two-year-old son would eat only the chicken from a roast dinner, demanding “more meat” – but it was certainly the start of us rethinking everything we ate. Soon, a traditional beef bolognese became Quorn-and-hidden-mushroom ragu. I learnt how to make tofu taste nice (fried in cornflour and soy sauce), and we started cooking Mediterranean mezzes with Israeli-style baked cauliflower, aubergine sprinkled with tahini and pomegranate, and homemade hummus and butter-bean stews.
I also learnt from where we could eke out protein. Instead of chicken soup, I made minestrone with butter beans, and butternut squash soup with toasted pumpkin seeds, but somehow could not quite master the art of Jewish vegetarian family dishes. I turned to a nutritionist Stefanie Daniels, who incorporates her nutrition training into her wellness business Life Begins at Menopause, for her thoughts and tips on eating healthily as a family.
She has expanded my repertoire with a mushroom and barley “cholent”, packed with root vegetables and pearl barley and niftily swapping the typical meat for mushrooms; “chopped liver” is recreated with lentil or mushroom (“a genuinely convincing texture and flavour match”): a matzah ball soup features vegetable stock instead of chicken stock, with matzah balls fashioned from oil instead of schmaltz; and an aubergine or mushroom “brisket” slow-braised in the same wine, onion and tomato base.
“When a family member changes how they eat, it rarely stays on just their plate alone,” says Daniels. “Meals become more of a shared conversation, ingredients and labels get read more closely, and everyone tends to eat a few more vegetables by default.
“It’s often these bottom-up shifts from a child, driven by curiosity rather than a diet plan, that stick the longest. The key for parents is to make sure this new way of eating still covers the nutritional bases.”
She points to the necessity of watching out for a healthy intake of iron and protein, which help build strong blood and muscles, and are easy enough to find in foods such as beans, lentils, eggs and dairy. B12, important for making energy and keeping the nervous system working properly, Daniels says is “trickier though, because it barely exists in plant foods at all, so needs to come from dairy, eggs, or other food sources that have had it added in.
If you can get that mix right, it becomes a genuinely healthier way of eating for the whole family, not just a meat-free one.”
As we approach Torbay, the home of Paignton Zoo, some three-and-a-half hours later (the traffic has been horrendous), I have some anxiety about Bruce’s whereabouts. What if, like the red pandas that are typically hiding in bushes when you arrive at their enclosures, Bruce is nowhere to be seen, after we have travelled so many hours to meet him?
What if Theo’s wonder is crushed? The zoo staff could not be more helpful, advising us to show up at 2.45pm for Bruce’s daily feed. We arrive in good time, to see as much of the zoo’s 80 acres, its lions, its terrifyingly enormous ten-metre reticulated python and beautifully kept botanical gardens and plant-lined walkways.
The anticipation is palpable. Bruce lives alongside a pair of potoroos, small marsupials in the Small Mammal House, which, it turns out, consists of an indoor and outdoor area, which means we are darting between both for some minutes before he makes his grand appearance.
We stand by, as if waiting for a celebrity to show up on the red carpet, and there he suddenly is, in all his spiny glory. Theo beams, and so do we all. It is extraordinary how a child can show the whole family the world through a new lens.
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